Let me tell you about Mrs. Stulting (part 1)

Last week, after I finished a particularly “happy” chapter from my novel-in-progress—social media working title Middle Earth Houston—I worried a little that I was seeing my elementary school and its teachers and principal through rose-colored glasses. Although it is autobiographical fiction, I still want the context to ring true to anyone who knows the area.

I therefore jumped feet first down that rabbit hole: Newspapers dot com. Everything I could possibly find about the school and its teachers, not just while I was there, but before and after too.

After a while, tears streamed down my face. I don’t have to worry about sugar-coating or being a Pollyanna. If anything, the actions our principal and teachers took behind the scene to protect us, to ensure we got a phenomenal education, went far above anything I could have imagined.

It was a poor inner city school, nothing fancy. By the time I entered kindergarten, Wharton Elementary had percolated along for a little over thirty years. The principal, Mrs. Elsa Stulting, had already served fifteen. My father’s first grade teacher still taught at Wharton, thirty years and counting.

I didn’t include Mrs. Stulting in my Mother’s Day tribute to broken women who love. Thought about it, but she was the authority figure. No warm fuzzies from her.

Perhaps it’s better she was momentarily left out. Let me tell you about Mrs. Stulting!

Historical Houston, Texas

I do have to backtrack a tiny bit for readers who have only known Houston since the late 1970s or late 1980s, or who do not know Houston at all. It’s difficult to understand why Mrs. Stulting played such a pivotal role for the teachers and students at Wharton Elementary if you don’t “see” the neighborhood the school occupied, specifically the rapidly-changing demographics of that neighborhood.

Initially Houston was divided into five wards. In theory, the wards were not racial or ethnic divides. Rather—and of course you should take this with a grain of salt—the wards were supposedly the equivalent of today’s voting precincts. Yes, please say, “Yeah right.”

When my great-grandfather Sachs scouted locations in Houston for a brickyard (1892), he and the owner of the Brick Works purchased fifty acres in what was then called “Fourth Ward North.” Fourth Ward consisted primarily of homes in Freedmen’s Quarter, where freed slaves had built homes and a cemetery shortly after the Civil War ended.

German and Jewish settlers established farms and businesses in “Fourth Ward North,” north of Buffalo Bayou. Both Glenwood Cemetery and neighboring “German cemetery”—now Washington Cemetery—are located in Fourth Ward North, while Beth Israel Cemetery and Founders Cemetery are in the original Fourth Ward, south of Buffalo Bayou. Founders and Beth Israel sit side by side, and about a mile away, outside Freedmen’s Quarter, is College Memorial Park Cemetery, where I’m told the oldest African-American graves in Houston can be found.

Supposedly Fourth Ward North was a “healthy” place to live. However, the same thing that made it an excellent brick yard made it horrifically unhealthy. Soil was swampy, good old Houston gumbo. Plagues of yellow fever kept gravediggers at all five local cemeteries busy. It was only worsened when Houston Water Works allowed municipal water sources to become contaminated. Not just for Freedmen’s Quarter, but Fourth Ward North as well. The city of Houston pumped sewage from Buffalo Bayou into the artesian wells that had provided clean water.

Residents demanded and received official designation as a true ward, becoming Houston’s Sixth Ward. That gave them the right to vote out the crooks who poisoned the water supply. They lost no time doing so. Freed slaves could technically vote, but again, yeah right.

After the death of my great-grandfather’s oldest three daughters—one being run over by an intoxicated streetcar driver—the Sachs family relocated to the south side of the bayou. He bought a ten-acre farm, built a brownstone house, and had everything tricked out with modern amenities like electricity, indoor toilets, and a telephone.

One mile outside the city limits. His phone number was not listed in Houston’s 1911 directory, although the phone number for the brickworks was, along with a large ad.

What is critical to note: Not only was his ten-acre farm one mile outside Houston city limits, but once Houston eventually annexed the farmland of all those German, Jewish, and Italian farmers and merchants (with a few Greeks and Irish for good measure), it was not added to Fourth Ward. There are maps that show it as Fourth Ward. It wasn’t. It was Harlow Subdivision.

Interesting to note that now in 2026, it’s fashionable to talk about living in Harlow. Not so much when I grew up there. From 1940-1999ish, Harlow was a poor immigrant community.

In 1929, the city of Houston constructed six brand new elementary schools. For whites only, of course. Wharton was the second of these to be opened. Remember, pre-stock-market-crash, people lived high. Wharton Elementary sat on a four-square-block bit of land. Polished granite floors in the lobby. Rubenesque portraits of Pink Girl and Blue Boy watching students. Classrooms with excellent wood floors and good ventilation. Permanent Maypole structure. A playground equipped with municipal-park style structures.

Wharton also benefited from “generous” zoning. Houston School District politely carved out Freedmen’s Quarter. Black children attended Gregory Elementary. Which meant that Wharton drew children from homes near what is now I-45 and downtown, all the way to what is now Shepherd. Upper middle class kids whose parents couldn’t quite afford River Oaks, so wrong side of what-is-now-Shepherd, to the downtown part of Fourth Ward. Less Freedmen’s Quarter.

Once the stock market crashed, funding for schools basically dried up. What had been upper middle class residences were now filled with families who weren’t sure about their finances. Still better off than most, but barely. Wharton adjusted. My father and his brother were among the children who attended Wharton in the 1930s whose parents had just enough, but not more.

When soldiers returned home from World War II, many were impoverished. They’d married and started families, often leaving wives to raise babies in their absence. City of Houston built San Felipe Courts in Fourth Ward, but northeast of Freedmen’s Quarter. Approximately one thousand single family apartments, complete with playground and community center. Small apartments—whites only—for low-income veterans and their families.

Note: What is now West Dallas was at the time, San Felipe. Houston’s never excelled at city planning. Rich white guys built and named things as they pleased. So there were two roads named San Felipe. My great-grandfather’s farm, as well as San Felipe Courts, plus Founders, Beth Israel, and College Memorial Park cemeteries, were all on San Felipe, now West Dallas.

Shortly after my great-grandfather moved south of the bayou, a “new” cemetery called Magnolia opened. It had no “whites only” restrictions, and in fact included Houston’s potter’s field. He sold his remaining lots in the German Cemetery and bought a large lot in Magnolia Cemetery. Also on San Felipe, now West Dallas.

Wharton Elementary had to adjust overnight. San Felipe Courts were, yes, in Fourth Ward. From 1944 onwards, children from 1000 apartments were suddenly zoned to Wharton. Of course, Freedmen’s Quarter kids kept going to Gregory. Buses drove through Freedmen’s Quarter to deliver white kids to Wharton.

In 1945, enter Mrs. Elsa Stulting. You will learn more about this woman tomorrow. So here she is, second job as elementary school principal, first larger school (her earlier school was about half the size of Wharton). With this influx of poor white kids mixed with those kids who lived very, very close to River Oaks. Forty-seven year old woman, tasked with a chaotic situation.

Things had just begun to ‘settle down’ in 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education put an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine. At that time, Houston School District had fuzzy boundary lines—seriously!—which allowed students or their parents to pretty much choose which school they attended. The school district left Freedmen’s Quarter zoned to Gregory, but Brown meant they could go to Wharton if they so chose.

And some of them “so chose.”

The neighborhood had grown more complex as well. My great-grandfather had gradually sold off most of his ten acres. Once the Great Depression was partly in the rearview mirror, developers put up pretty little bungalows or cottages as fast as they could.

From the 1930s through the mid-1950s, these homes were purchased almost as quickly as they were built.

Purchasers? Immigrants, fresh off the proverbial boat. Many spoke Italian or Greek or Cantonese or Spanish or whatever at home. The 1950s at Wharton Elementary featured first-gen immigrants plus a few like my family who were second or at best third-gen, plus white children of low-income veterans (San Felipe Courts), plus Black children whose parents enrolled them at Wharton.

This was the Wharton I encountered in 1960 when I entered kindergarten. I assumed every school was like Wharton, rich kids, poor kids, every race and ethnicity and religion imaginable. I couldn’t imagine going to school with its not being that way.

As I learned more about Mrs. Stulting, I realized we could enjoy what seemed like the most natural thing on earth because she protected “her” teachers and “her” students. I had no idea what it cost her (tomorrow!).

After I left Wharton, the area initially became overwhelmingly Hispanic, mostly Mexican immigrants, relatively few from south of Mexico. Mrs. Stulting took it in stride. They were still “her” students.

As the war in Vietnam wound down and Houston was flooded with refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, those families—like Italians, Greeks, Germans, Jews, Irish, Chinese, and Mexican before them—settled in the Fourth Ward and Harlow. And went to Wharton.

I remember reading racist editorials from teachers in other schools, complaining about Vietnamese kids showing up in pajamas, or deriding those tiny children for not speaking English. Not at Wharton. At Wharton, where Mrs. Stulting still watched out for “her” teachers and “her” students, they were precious in her sight.

Once even the most recent refugees left for the suburbs, once Houston demolished San Felipe Courts (which had been rechristened Allen Parkway Village), the school district tried to demolish Wharton Elementary too.

Oh my goodness. You’d have thought Houston School District had rooted for the Dallas Cowboys or the Eagles. Alumni came out of the woodwork to defend this place. This place! Because it was far more than a place.

The school district begrudgingly agreed and first converted it into a dual language (bilingual) magnet school, K-6. As of 2026, there are so few children living in Neartown, the Montrose area of Houston, that they are keeping it alive by expanding it to eighth grade, still as a dual language school.

As has happened through the years, the community came together, with various organizations and businesses donating funds to carry out needed renovations. Same as Interfaith Ministry and parents-parents-parents did for the first seventy-five years of its life.

I think Mrs. Stulting would have been pleased. And that will make perfect sense to you. Tomorrow.

Postscript: If you have concrete evidence that something above is incorrect, please contact me or post a comment! So much of what Houston writes about itself these days is simply wrong. For example, the Sixth Ward didn’t become the Sixth Ward until after the Houston Water Works fraud. That’s based on contemporary Houston Post and Houston Chronicle articles detailing the debate.

But you’ll often see supposedly accurate scholarly treatises that put the formation of Sixth Ward much earlier. Nope. It was Fourth Ward North.

Note too that Houston has long had issues with its treatment of freed slaves post-Civil War. Fourth Ward, with its shotgun houses, was indeed designated as location for freed slaves to build homes and settle down. Note to the note: Creole freedmen had settled in I think it was Fifth Ward before the end of the Civil War. The boundaries between Creole and freed Texas slaves were harsh.

When Houston needed to carve out an area for “other” development, city fathers quite often appropriated land in the Fourth Ward, specifically from Freedmen’s Quarter. San Felipe Courts was a prime example. Technically that was part of Freedmen’s Quarter. But it became low-income housing, for whites only.

I also think it’s funny that Founder’s Cemetery, where Houston’s founding “fathers” are buried, is square in the middle of Freedmen’s Quarter! If you want to support ongoing preservation work in Freedmen’s Quarter (now Freedmen’s Town), here’s how to do so.

Comment worth sharing

Those quotes you keep sticking on "her" teachers, "her" students. And never once actually explaining them. When a principal calls the kids hers, usually it's obvious, she's marking who she runs. With her it went the exact other way, same word and all.

And that line, "some so chose," there's a pile of stuff behind it you're not saying. In 1960 the district let twelve Black kids past that line. Twelve, the whole city, you get it? Most of the ones who tried just got turned away, or sent to court, or made to wait. So a kid landing on her doorstep didn't mean the door was open to everyone. Some specific person had to decide not to turn him back around. I figure that's exactly the cost you're holding back for tomorrow.

Anyway. Pink Girl and Blue Boy got to watch all of it.

PS: Denise, you just put your finger on the thing I kept circling and couldn't quite name. Those quotation marks aren't about ownership. They're about responsibility nobody handed you.

When a principal says "my kids" as possession, that's a power move. The ones under my roof, my authority, my thumb. Put "my" inside quotes and it flips. It means people you took on yourself, with no blood, no contract, no mandate, nobody asking.

Stulting had no claim on those children. That's the point. "Her students" would be too clean, and dropping the word would erase what she became to them. The quotes are the only honest work available.

Same pattern sits inside the White Rose material. Families took in people who weren't theirs and treated them like their own. Willi Graf endured months of interrogation while the Gestapo tried to squeeze more names out of him, and carried that weight so others could keep breathing. Nobody appointed him to it. It's the same quotation mark, just under torture instead of over coffee.

That's why your second half is the harder book. The first exposes the lie inside that old "our Blacks" language. Painful, but still exposure, a lie most people already half-know. The second has to admit the cost was real and got paid by specific people who could have stepped aside and stayed clean and didn't. A decent principal who let a kid past the line wasn't being kind. She was spending something. Standing, job, the room she had left to move in. That isn't uplift. It's a bill coming due.

The bishop is your control case. Same religious furniture, same "my kids," except in his mouth "my" meant property. In Stulting's it meant shelter. Same word, opposite act. Anyway, I'll stop. You've got the spine of it already.

--Vance Frost, May 25, 2026.

Let me tell you about Mrs. Stulting (part 2).

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Map of “Neartown” that was zoned to Wharton. Upper right is San Felipe Courts. Below it is Freedman’s Quarter. Wharton Elementary is to the west (left) of both. Outlined in purple. Google Maps used in accordance with Google T&C.